Her nonprofit is dedicated to accelerating development of clean-energy businesses in the Midwest. Its measure of success would be extinction in 10 years.

October 30, 2012|By Julie Wernau, Chicago Tribune reporter

"How bad can life be when you get to design the first interactive software for Mr. Potato Head?" said Schlein, who runs her family winery and is involved in several technology consulting ventures. "You were just hoping that nobody swallowed any small parts or choked."

More importantly, Schlein gave Francetic the room and the network she needed to grow, introducing her to tech giants including Apple's Steve Jobs.

"Amy has insatiable curiosity," Schlein said, "intellectual curiosity, and she really understands the marriage between creativity and business. Most people don't have that."

Eventually, Hasbro decided to fold the interactive division of its business into its corporate headquarters in Rhode Island. Schlein, Francetic and the other employees took severance packages rather than move.

"We were having too much fun in Silicon Valley," Francetic said. "All this stuff was starting up. It was really alive."

In the mid-1990s, Francetic joined Interval Research Corp., a Silicon Valley-based laboratory and business incubator that had 10 years of funding from Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft.

There, before age 30, Francetic created a business called Zowie, which used radio frequency identification technology that, years before Wii, allowed children to play with a toy while their actions were transmitted to a virtual world on their computer screen.

She hired several of her former Hasbro co-workers and spun the Zowie business out of Interval. Suddenly, she was co-founder and CEO of her own company, traveling back and forth to Asia to deal with manufacturing issues and negotiating pricing.

"It was really freaking hard," Francetic said. "I tell people today — don't do all that stuff. Figure out the piece you can do better than anybody, work with other folks who can do all that other stuff, because it's really hard. It almost killed us."

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley's tech bubble was bursting. And Francetic was about to get married. The honeymoon to Australia and New Zealand was already planned.

"She said to me, 'I'm sorry, dear, we've got to sell the business right now, and I've got to deal with that,'" said her husband, who is general manager in charge of Coinstar Inc.-owned Redbox's new ticketing venture, Redbox Tickets.

Seeking a buyer for Zowie, she set her sights on Lego, which had never purchased a company. To seal the deal she also had to persuade Allen, her majority shareholder, to sell the company.

They pushed back the wedding six months, setting the date for Jan. 1, 2000, "just to tempt fate," Rubinstein said with a laugh, referring to their Y2K wedding date, when some feared a technology glitch would freeze the world's computers.

Amid all the others she needed to convince in the deal, "I was the easy sell," Rubinstein said of their upended plans.

Changing the world

By the early 2000s, Francetic was exhausted. She wanted to have children, and the timing was right. She had sold the business, negotiated an exit and ushered her team into Lego. Everything was in place.

But as Dar Williams sang, sometimes life gives us lessons sent in ridiculous packaging. At a doctor's visit, she mentioned a strange lump near her sternum. It turned out to be an unusual cancer.

Ten years later, Francetic is cancer-free and only rarely thinks about that "dark period" of her life. But it would affect her choices from that moment onward.

"She came to the realization life can be short," Rubinstein said. "Make the best decisions."

After her first child, Francetic decided she wanted to make a difference, to delve deeper into the science of technology, to find the gems in America's research labs that were waiting to come out.

During her last year and a half in Silicon Valley, and for a couple of years after moving to the Midwest, Francetic worked for the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International), working with scientists to commercialize everything from the early version of what would becomeSiri (the voice-recognition personal assistant technology on the iPhone) to fuel cells, which produce electricity in cells from a chemical reaction.

In Chicago, she worked part time, and from home, while her children were young before she joined MVC Capital Inc., a middle-market private equity fund, where she learned that making money and changing the world could go hand in hand.

"I would tell the people who worked for me, 'Everyone who comes in here with an idea thinks they're going to change the world. Your job is to find the ones who will,'" said Warren Holtsberg, co-head and member of the board of directors at MVC Capital in Chicago.

While Francetic dreams big, ultimately, Holtsberg said, her success comes from the fact she's a realist. About 7 of 10 venture investments will fail completely, he said, and of the three that succeed, only one will be wildly successful.